Audio Video News

It ranks as many movie buffs' best film of all time, and has landed at the top of the American Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest American Movies, but until now, you could not get it on DVD. The film, of course, is Citizen Kane, Orson Welles' Academy-Award-winning masterwork credited with expanding film-making frontiers like no other movie in history.

Kane fans can now rejoice: The film is slated for release September 25 as a double-disc DVD in a newly packaged 60th anniversary collector's edition from Warner Home Video. The studio says the DVD will feature "breathtakingly" restored picture and audio, which have been digitally remastered from the highest quality surviving elements, along with a variety of extras.

WHV says that the second disc in this double-disc DVD release is The Battle Over Citizen Kane, a two-hour Oscar-nominated documentary "that chronicles the titanic struggle between filmmaker Orson Welles and newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who claimed Citizen Kane was a thinly veiled and slanderous account of his own life." WHV adds that the documentary also reveals how Hearst used his formidable power to try to stop production and distribution of the film, and how he ultimately sought to destroy Welles himself.

According to the studio, disc one of the double-disc DVD edition includes the film itself along with several special features: two full-length audio commentaries (one by noted film critic Roger Ebert and the other by writer/director and Welles biographer Peter Bogdanovich); the 1941 New York movie premiere newsreel; a gallery of storyboards, rare production photos, call sheets, and other memorabilia; and the original theatrical trailer.

Starring, as well as produced, directed and co-written by Welles, Citizen Kane premiered May 1, 1941, at the RKO Palace in New York City, and was nominated that same year for 9 Academy Awards, winning the Oscar for Best Screenplay. WHV says that the Citizen Kane DVD set will list for $29.99.